Petty Apple is petty. Amazon, Kobo, and others have changed their applications to conform to Apple's App Store rules, and if there's one word that describes the situation these booksellers are in, it's petty. Still, it's leading to good things: Kobo has announced it's going to bypass the App Store by writing an HTML5 e-reader for iOS (and thus, for other HTML5-capable mobile devices).

"And where would these users be without Apple and their products. Do you remember the world before iPhone? There would not be an Android without iPhone."

Nonsense!

Would you say "there would be no personal computers without microsoft"?

The personal computing revolution was the result of a combination of things: increasing purchasing power of the consumer, discovery of new CPU fabrication techniques, dropping electronics prices, good education, long term investment, etc. Microsoft was a product of it's environment more than the other way around. As much as MS enjoys having been there to take the credit, the personal computing revolution would have arrived whether or not they were on board.

In the same sense, apple products are a product of today's environment as well. Don't forget that apple's first tablets 1.5 decades ago were a total flop.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad apple's here to the extent that more competition is better. But as controversial as it may seem to some, the tech world doesn't rotate around apple. All else being equal, had apple gone under in the dot com bubble, there's absolutely no reason to think that others would be unable to bring tablet computers to the masses today.

With apple out of the picture, former apple fanatics would need some other entity to latch onto. Conceivably that could be google.